Confessions of a preteen Church Lady

Hullo readers—I write a weekly column for the Blaze’s lifestyle pages, Align. Hilariously, it’s for the men’s section.

This is my latest column, reprinted here with permission from the Blaze, thank you. Extra thanks to my editor, Matt Himes, who polishes my words just right every time.

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Get in hosers, we’re going back to 1986 — when you could “just do things,” as the kids say.

If you’re middle-aged, you remember when you could just do things without filming them for TikTok. Without rearranging your bedroom to have the right look for “the ‘gram.” You could do things without waiting for an audience of thousands or millions staring at their phones.

But more than that, you could just do things in the real world without a phone, a tablet, a smart watch, or any other digital tether.

Weird kid, normal childhood

Generation X was the last cohort to have a normal childhood of riding bikes until it was dusk (suppertime), playing with old cars in the junkyard, and making lean-tos in the woods. No adults expected their kids to be under their gaze all day, and we only had to fish out a quarter for a call home on a pay phone if something happened and we needed a ride.

I was a weird kid with weird friends. You develop unusual interests when you grow up with no father and a mother who is a cross between Nurse Ratched, Mommie Dearest, and Piper Laurie's religious fanatic mother in the movie “Carrie.” While normal boys were playing T-ball, I was playing "funeral home" and "cemetery."

As a kid in Southern California, my friend Julie and I used to ride our banana seat bikes down to the school parking lot and outdoor paved cafeteria on weekends. The metal clasp hanging on a rope on the flag pole used to clank against the pole in the wind, making a “bong!” sound like a church bell.

Julie and I knew this was because Topaz Elementary School had been built on an “ancient graveyard.” The bells were ringing to let the dead know that it was OK to come out of their graves under the pavement because those pesky living kids were all gone for two days.

Mummy dearest

Fast forward five years, and back in upstate New York, I found a kid named Tom who was just as odd.

Tom had a kind of modern-day, white-trash Pippi Longstocking lifestyle. Unlike Pippi’s dad, Tom’s father wasn’t a captain at sea, but he might as well have been. Mr. E spent spent every day completely schnockered. He mowed the lawn in a frayed jockstrap and nothing else. We had the run of the three-story house because Mr. E ignored everything but Schlitz and that brown corduroy recliner.

Tom built a stone kiln in his backyard to fire clay pots. This is where we made miniature sarcophagi for the dead birds and shrews that we mummified. Yes, we did place them in salt (we called it “natron”), then wrapped them in cotton bandages before respectfully encasing them in pottery coffins. I still have one (the sarcophagus, not the mummy).

Audience by ambush

Like many of today’s kids, I was a performer who wanted an audience. But in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone days, your audience was limited to the people you could persuade to stand in front of you in the actual three-dimensional world.

Or you could get an audience by stealth ambush, my preferred method.

Vinyl LPs were still the dominant way people heard music in my youth, and my mother had a collection of comedy show records; they were in vogue in the 1970s.

Pranks for the memories

I wore out Lily Tomlin’s “This Is a Recording,” her stand-up show featuring Ernestine, the telephone operator. I practiced saying things like, “One ringy-dingy. Two ringy-dingies,” for hours in front of the mirror until I got the voice just right.

Then, I opened up the phone book and picked “old people” names at random and dialed (remember, this was before caller ID).

Me: One ringy-dingy. Two ring-ooh! Snort! Good afternoon; have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

Her: Yes, this is Mrs. Fletcher.

Me: Mrs. Fletcher, I have an annoying problem that only you, as a New York Telephone customer, can solve. According to our files, you owe a balance of 15 dollars and 78 cents for the use of your instrument, which, I remind you, is wired into your wall courtesy of our burly repairmen [fiddle with décolletage] at the telephone company. When may we expect payment?

I shudder to think how many unnecessary checks the elderly ladies of Cortland made out to New York Telephone.

Junior shock jock

But that was just one person. What about an audience of thousands?

I started calling into WOKO 100.1, OK-100!, “Central New York’s Home for Top 40 Hits.” It was always having contests where caller number seven got a free pizza from Pudgies or a copy of Madonna’s new album. I figured out a timing system, accounting for the travel time the phone’s dial took to complete each number, and managed to be “caller seven” suspiciously often.

When the DJ answered the phone, I was in go-mode as the “Church Lady,” the prudish fundamentalist grandma character played by Dana Carvey on "Saturday Night Live."

OK100: Caller seven, you’ve got it! Tell us who you are.

Me: Most people just call me the Church Lady, which you should well know, as Satan has obviously been whispering sweet-and-sour nothings into your ear or you wouldn’t be playing music from harlots like that bleached-blonde tart named after our holy mother.

You cannot imagine the joy of being 12 years old and making a fully grown man, an on-air DJ, crack up laughing so hard he could barely put the next record on. They started asking me to call in on purpose to do impressions.

But it wasn’t enough.

Hooked

The year before, I played Captain Hook in the Cortland Junior High production of "Peter Pan."

As I was speaking one of my lines, the painted wooden cutout of a pirate ship collapsed on the stage. So I ad-libbed: “Don’t just stand there, pick it up, you lazy swabbies — we’ve got a play to finish!”

It brought down the house.

I wanted another taste of entertaining a live crowd, so I decided to perform on the roof of the wraparound porch on the old, beat-up Victorian we rented from Mr. and Mrs. Maniacci two doors down.

Isn't that special?

My gorgon mother had gone to California for a week’s vacation and hired Lori the babysitter to stay with us kids. Oh, boy!

Stuffing my paper route money into my satchel, I walked to the Salvation Army store and came home with a curly grandma wig, a seafoam-green polyester shift, opaque “nude” pantyhose, and sensible orthopedic shoes.

My sister helped me crawl out the window of her bedroom onto the roof of the porch and handed me a broom so I had something with which to menace passersby. It wasn’t long before a young couple came walking up the street.

“It’s always nice to see a young couple," I called out.

Having secured their attention, I continued, "... except the kind that doesn’t wear a wedding ring and thinks co-habitation is just fine and dandy. How long have you been living in sin, pressing your engorged naughty parts against the devil’s finger? Does it tingle?”

The first reaction was shocked silence. The second was uproarious laughter. Swishy 12-year-old boys in grandma drag talking about “bulbous bits” were thin on the ground in rustbelt New York State, and I gave the people what they didn’t know they needed.

For the rest of the afternoon I preached fire and brimstone, insulting everyone who walked by as a rake and a floozy. A few people came back with friends so they, too, could experience the cleansing power of righteous testimony.

Canceled!

At the end of the week, my mother returned. While I was taking a bath, I heard a rap on the front door. “Bonnie! Bonnie! I need to talk to you.” Oh, shoot — it was Mrs. Maniacci, the landlady!

Scurrying out of the tub to press my ear to the door, I mostly heard my mother’s side of the conversation. “Uh-huh. Really? He did what? I see. Thank you Mrs. Maniacci, I’ll take care of it.”

“JOSHUA LAWRENCE SLOCUM GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!”

The punishment was worth it. I’d do it again and again and then again.

Do your kids know how to just do fun things?